


Wanderers

by ackermom



Series: Convalescence [2]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Ending, F/F, Polyamory, Post-Canon, other ships are mentioned: pieck/galliard & mikasa/eren/armin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-02-27 11:02:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13246854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ackermom/pseuds/ackermom
Summary: People thought that, after the war, life would be simple.





	Wanderers

**Author's Note:**

> how to negotiate an affair with your ex-enemy who is also sleeping with the asshole who ate one half of your favorite lesbian duo

People thought that, after the war, life would be simple. 

Mikasa cannot blame them for wishing it would be so, but she was never able to believe such a thing. She stopped believing in black-and-white years ago. Sometimes she still dreams about the sun-bleached days of her childhood, and she thinks that life was not simple, not even then, even when she believed it was. Believing something does not make it so, even when she was small and starry-eyed.

She is still starry-eyed, she is told.  _Like a wanderer_ , whispered two nights ago beneath cotton sheets in the twilight. Mikasa almost let herself believe those words, those fervent affirmations pressed in kisses on her brow. Then piano fingers shook her as they trailed down her exposed skin, and she wondered how anyone could see that in her eyes. She has seen her eyes. She has seen her darkness. Mikasa could not blame anyone for wanting a simpler world, a child's world, especially after the war, but simplicity is not how she played her cards. Even now, when the world is quiet again, when there is nothing to do but rebuild, even now- life is not simple.

She may still be starry-eyed, but she is not naive. And so this morning's revelation should not surprise her the way that it does. 

"With..." Mikasa says. She trails off, because she had not considered the next word. 

She stands before the open windows. When the sea breeze blows in, the gauzy white curtains brush against the backs of her bare legs. Her skin is golden from too many days between cobblestone ruins. Her hair is tousled over her shoulders, getting too long again, after so many years. The white shirt is not hers, and now she examines the hem of it, quietly pulling it further down her bare thighs. She feels childish to be standing here, so naked, sullied thoughts running through her mind as a grey breeze blows against her back.

Pieck, on the other hand, barely glances up from the mirror. "With Porco," she says. She runs her wooden brush through her hair. "Yeah."

Mikasa will admit that the intricacy of a tryst is part of the appeal. She wants to feel what others feel, to have dangerous lips pressed against hers, at the risk- at the pleasure- of knowing what people really think of her. She had not ever doubted that this affair would be simple. But that name rolls so nonchalantly off Pieck's tongue, and Mikasa feels a red frustration rising in her chest. She tugs on the hem of her shirt. She can barely conjured Porco Galliard's face in her mind- all she sees is an impish glare, a flash of his eyes in some dark dungeon, glimpses of him from across the city streets- but it seems that she has been sharing a bed with him all along. She wonders if the sheets smell like him. 

"Were you going to tell me about this?" Mikasa says.

She watches Pieck consider. The curled ends of her hair fall softly over her bare shoulders, and the marble curve of her spine draws down in an easy arc to her skinny cheeks perched on the blue-cushioned stool. No one has ever made an imminent death look so good. Mikasa has memorized her curves, but in this sea-blown room, she tries to remember if they have ever spoken for this long. 

She turns her back and dresses in front of the open window. The shirt is the first thing to go. She slips it off like it's a silk robe and drops it to the floor, where it wrinkles. She does not care if anyone is watching from the streets. On the contrary, some secret part of her hopes that someone will look in and get off on humanity's finest stripping before the window.

She can feel Pieck shrug from across the room. 

"I don't know," Pieck says. Her brush clatters against the dressing table. "I didn't know if you would care." 

Mikasa slips into her work trousers. "I hope he doesn't have any venereal diseases."

"Oh, you're jealous," Pieck purrs, and then she has crossed the room and pressed herself against Mikasa's back. She slides her hands over Mikasa's bare stomach before she can finish buttoning her shirt. For a shifter, she is cold, and Mikasa winces at her fingers. "That's cute."

"I just wish you had told me."

"You're not leaving for good, are you? We agreed in the beginning, this is just for fun."

"I'm fine with that," Mikasa says, and she is. She chooses not to define what she has with Eren and Armin (she does not know if she can define it, those long nights spent huddled three in a bed, barefoot, back to breast, their fingers laced together, the way Eren blushed when they teased him about wet dreams, until they were having those dreams together, all three of him, the heat rising between their bodies until nothing else mattered) and she does not mind sharing Pieck's attention. Sharing is half the fun. They were never meant to be exclusive. She still has Eren and Armin to think about, her sentenced boys, curled up somewhere across the city, reading poems like they are eulogies. 

And they never have been exclusive, not until the last few days, when the rain has made work impossible, when they have rarely left the bed, choosing instead to linger on each other's skin. They have the love bites to show for it. It is not the possibility of Pieck's other partners that bothers her. It is the fact that Pieck is made of crystal and she could have anyone in her bed, begging to be released under her fingertips, and she still managed to make the worst possible choice. 

"Oh, it's just Porco, isn't it?" Pieck asks. She settles her head on Mikasa's shoulder, her breath like steam. "That's the part you're mad about."

She is like a cat. Perceptive at the worst possible times. 

"I'm not mad," Mikasa says. She slides out of the embrace and starts on her shirt buttons. 

"You don't have to like him," Pieck says. "As much as I would love to lock you two in a room together and see what happens, I'm not sure there would be any survivors." 

"I am a titan-killing expert," Mikasa says.

Pieck makes her regret it by kissing the nape of her neck. "I know you are."

"I'm not mad," Mikasa repeats. "But I won't like him."

She remembers Galliard now: priggish, with an insufferable sneer and a temper to match. The one who broke Historia's hand with his stupid face.

Pieck smirks. "Alright. He doesn't like you either." 

She crosses to the dressing table and throws a slip over her head. Her breasts wiggle as she dances into it, and when the straps finally fall onto her shoulder, the hem of the slip brushes against the top of her knees. Mikasa watches this ritual, then turns back to the window and closes the last of her buttons.

"I guess I'm just curious," she says. Her voice feels small, empty, in the face of the ocean wind. "Of all people..."

"You understand," Pieck says. Her voice drops, and when Mikasa glances over her shoulder, Pieck has turned her face to the window and closed her eyes. She lets the ocean breeze rush along her cold skin. She breathes. "When someone knows you, you have to let them in. You don't have a choice. They are your only choice."

Mikasa has heard these words before.

"I understand," she says.

She turns around. Pieck is smiling again. Mikasa looks into her moon eyes and wonders.

"The world has shown me its face," Mikasa says softly. "It will always be this way, won't it?"

"Oh, Mika," Pieck says breathlessly, in the way that only star girls know how to do. She takes Mikasa's face in her cold hands and kisses constellations on her cheeks.  _Starry-eyed_ , Mikasa thinks.

"It is not the world that is complicated," Pieck breathes. "It is us." 


End file.
